MEDIA; At One Paper, All Tension Is Local

By SHARON WAXMAN

Published: July 17, 2006

Wendy P. McCaw, the reclusive multimillionaire owner of The Santa Barbara News-Press, is at war with her own staff. What started as a conflict over journalistic ethics has in the past week escalated into a full-blown rebellion.

Staffers have been marching out the door, accusing her of interfering with their editorial independence. When she published her explanation of the departures as an expression of bias in the reporting staff on Thursday, even more quit. On Friday, her staff -- or what remained of it -- held a rally outside the newspaper building, where some 30 reporters and editors, dressed in black, put duct tape over their mouths, to represent the owner's gag order issued last week.

Throughout, Mrs. McCaw, who acquired the paper in 2000, has been absent, away in Europe and communicating mainly through her deputy, the acting publisher and opinion page editor, Travis Armstrong.

In her first interview about the resignations, she said on Sunday that the fault was with those who had left.

''This is not a freedom of the press issue, or of intimidation of the newsroom,'' she said. ''There were personality differences in the newsroom, and the people who didn't want to be there are not there any longer.''

At a time when the future of newspapers is being challenged by the Internet, and as newspapers around the country -- large and small -- debate the merits of private versus corporate ownership, The News-Press is an example of what can happen when an active, committed local owner determines to steer her own path.

But the still-unfolding story of the paper, a 105-year-old institution in this upscale, seaside city, remains highly unusual. It is certainly a surprising turn for a paper that won a Pulitzer Prize under its last local owner, Thomas M. Storke, in 1962, and which frequently wins general excellence awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

At the heart of the conflict is Mrs. McCaw, an enigmatic local figure whose fortune, which resulted from her divorce from the cellphone magnate Craig McCaw in 1997, was at one time estimated by Forbes at more than $1 billion. She bought the paper in 2000 from The New York Times Company for more than $100 million (the exact figure was not made public). Known as a libertarian, environmentalist, animal-rights activist and vegetarian, she rarely is seen in the newsroom. Amid all the turmoil, she said she was reading the paper only ''occasionally.''

But Mrs. McCaw has expressed strong views via the editorial page, about issues from property rights to the preservation of wild pigs in the nearby Channel Islands. Sometimes her views raised eyebrows, as when an editorial called for people to donate rice and beans, rather than turkeys, to the poor on Thanksgiving.

Mr. Armstrong, meanwhile, has become a magnet for discontent outside the paper because of his sharply worded editorials about local officials, including the mayor, and his own involvement in the news-gathering operation. Since becoming acting publisher two weeks ago, he quashed a news article about the newsroom resignations -- running his column with an explanation instead -- and killed an article about a city councilwoman's decision to retire.

In the six years since the paper changed owners, circulation at The News-Press has dropped steadily -- as it has at most newspapers across the country -- from 48,000 to about 40,000. Still, profit margins have risen to 25 percent from about 11 percent, buoyed by advertising from Santa Barbara's booming, high-end real-estate market and the elimination of employee benefits like pensions and 401(k)'s, according to a former top executive at the paper, who asked not to be named because the information was proprietary.

The paper's management has been in flux, with six publishers holding the job over the last five years, even as Jerry Roberts, a respected journalist recruited from The San Francisco Chronicle to be executive editor, professionalized the paper and filled the front page with local news.

In a front-page note to readers on Thursday, Mrs. McCaw essentially accused members of her staff of misconduct, writing that the turmoil at the paper resulted because her ideals of ''accurate unbiased reporting, and more local stories that readers want to read'' were not being reached.

''When news articles become opinion pieces, reporting went unchecked and the paper was used as a personal arena to air petty infighting by the editors, these goals were not met,'' she wrote.

The letter was met with outrage and confusion in the newsroom. ''It's a sad thing for her to attack her own newsroom that way,'' said Mr. Roberts, who resigned. ''What's the message here?''

In her interview, Mrs. McCaw did not elaborate much on her critique of the news coverage, mentioning an instance when editors published the address of the actor Rob Lowe in a news article about a property dispute. ''I'm committed to the highest standards of journalism and quality,'' she said. ''And I'm committed to putting out the paper.''